5 Reasons Why You Need an Internal PR Newsletter

5 Reasons Why You Need an Internal PR Newsletter

As PR pros we can get caught up in the everyday tasks of our work. That’s understandable; it takes time to broadcast the successes of an organization, cultivate relationships with media, protect a brand from detractors, benchmark competitors, and of course, track the success of programs and campaigns to report ROI. Besides stopping for a deep breath every once in a while, something PR professionals often forget to build into their hectic schedule is a way to share their successes with colleagues—and prove PR’s contribution to business goals.

It’s possible that employees may not see PR coverage and not know how the company brand is being represented. Or if they do, it is only the public message that your colleagues are seeing. If you’re not sharing you and your team’s work, colleagues are missing out on understanding on how you spend a big chunk of time. In a corporate landscape that demands budget line items have an associated justification, letting co-workers know how your work aligns with the work they do can be as powerful as your traditional PR activities. By continuing to work like this, you’re giving them the magic show without letting see behind the curtain. That’s why, in many ways, internal PR can be a synonym for transparency in the workplace for the comms department.

Beyond allowing transparency into the work you do, feeding content into internal PR can help you in a number of ways. So, how do you do that without constantly compiling and emailing out links when the company’s brand gets some impressive coverage? An internal PR newsletter can be automated in your MarTech stack to do the job for you:

An internal PR newsletter can:

Act as a platform for broadcasting media and social media coverage. With all the earned media coverage you track, beyond the comms department and your monthly reports to executives, who else in your organization sees these pieces? If you had an internal PR newsletter, links to media coverage could be shared throughout your organization. And with these links, summaries of the coverage and what the context is for your organization is spelled out. Additionally, engagement from influencers or media on social media indicates how well your brand is engaging on social.

Take stock of the competitive landscape.A newsletter can be an opportunity to cover industry news, trends, and insights. No matter how innovative a company is, competitors are a healthy part of any industry. That’s why highlighting the achievements, as well as the missteps of close competitors, can give colleagues insight into how to do their jobs. With your media monitoring solution in place, you can benchmark how well you’re doing in comparison to your top marketplace competitors. By sharing these metrics, you’re allowing colleagues insight into using how this data can inform future campaigns.

Feed into an employee brand ambassador content program. It can be a repository to share fresh links and messages to help brand ambassadors tell the organization’s story their way. You’ll set up brand ambassadors for success by highlighting positive articles, mentions from partners, and intel you’ve gathered from social listening. And if you send the newsletter out via your media intelligence platform, you’ll have additional information about which colleagues are opening and reading content. These engaged co-workers can be tapped for future collaborations, whether that is for thought pieces or as candidates for the employee ambassador program.

Provide the data analytics behind the successes of your PR efforts. Data is how a segment of your colleagues track success, so in addition to sharing media coverage, you can share easy to read graphs and charts that track monthly media coverage, social media mentions, sentiment, competitive benchmarks, etc… It’s an easy way to benchmark the work you do for those more interested in volume than they are the engagement aspect of KPIs.

Highlight key partners and customers. Use the newsletter as an opportunity to highlight key partners and customers and what their public media coverage is. The newsletter can show how your key partners and customers are using your products and services in interesting ways. This can be useful for sales, biz dev, and customer service teams as they reach out o new partners or assist existing partners and clients. It can also help UX/CX and engineering teams as they understand how products and services are actually used by partners and clients.

Your PR work contributes to business goals as much as sales or engineering. And while the work of those two teams have easy ways to show coworkers the work they accomplish, you can do the same with an internal PR newsletter.

If you’re interested in seeing how easy it is to produce a weekly internal PR newsletter with Meltwater, our team can show you how it’s done with keyword searches you have in place.

5 Reasons Why You Need an Internal PR Newsletter was last modified: August 8th, 2017 by Meltwater